Bear with Me

Everybody is writing memoirs these days, including Margaret Atwood, whose recollections of her astounding career are expected later this year. Even so, it is hard to top the subject matter of the novelist and journalist Claire Cameron’s new book, which features a bear, the wilderness, and a life-threatening genetic mutation.

Cameron is no stranger to death or storytelling. She was only nine years old when her beloved father, Angus, died of metastasized melanoma on May 27, 1983. He was forty-two, a Rhodes Scholar, a distinguished academic at the University of Toronto, and the founder of The Dictionary of Old English. He was also a great teller of tales, whose favourite bedtime ritual involved recounting his version of Beowulf, the epic Nordic poem, which was written at least a millennium ago.

“My dad’s retelling,” Cameron writes in How to Survive a Bear Attack, “had everything: shining swords, brave acts, fierce battles, and gold...